Rumor: Asus has made an offer to acquire board maker ASRock

Shawn Knight

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Rumors are circulating at this hour that Asus has made an offer to acquire fellow motherboard maker ASRock. Charlie Demerjian from SemiAccurate says ASRock’s parent company, Pegatron, approves of the takeover bid but nothing is official yet.

It may come as a surprise to some that ASRock isn’t exactly a mediocre manufacturer. In fact, they overtook MSI in 2010 to become the third largest board maker in the world. Asus remains the top manufacturer with 22 million boards shipped while Gigabyte placed second at 18 million units. In the same time frame, MSI and ECS both shipped around seven million boards.

If the deal goes through, this would be the second time that Asus has owned ASRock. The company was originally formed in 2002 to compete with manufacturers like Foxconn on the entry level / OEM market. This allowed ASRock to gain a following without competing directly with Asus’ higher end product lineup.

ASRock was eventually spun off and picked up by Pegatron. Since then, they’ve developed a solid reputation as an all-around quality board maker. They still offer budget mainboards but now ship mid-range and high-end products as well.

An acquisition would only help to solidify Asus’ position as the top board maker in the world. Demerjian believes the move would even force smaller players out of the already unhealthy industry completely. An industry dominated by Asus and Gigabyte could become a reality before people even realize what happened, Demerjian says.

Discussions are ongoing but we could hear more on this in the near future.

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For some reason I already though ASRock was owned by ASUS :p. Well if they do buy them I hope they keep their line of inexpensive but quality boards. I have used a lot of ASRock boards for building cost effective computers.
 
I thought the same thing. Haha Guess I don't pay enough attention to these companies sometimes.
 
Inexpensive quality boards? Oh please. It's called killing competition.
 
Inexpensive quality boards? Oh please. It's called killing competition.


It's called competition.


The very definition of competition in economics is better quality at lower price. (there's more than that but this pretty much sums it up)
 
Inexpensive quality boards? Oh please. It's called killing competition.
It's called competition.

The very definition of competition in economics is better quality at lower price. (there's more than that but this pretty much sums it up)
Which if the rumor is true, is probably why ASUS wants to buy them out. What better way is there to raise merchandise prices of competitors? The inexpensive boards my not be killing competition but the buy out would be.
 
The ASRock z77 Extreme 4 has to be the best budget oriented board for gaming. I know it's not the cheapest z77 board, but it is one of the cheapest that supports SLI and has plenty of features for enthusiasts without stepping up to a $200 motherboard.

I really hope that Asus doesn't buy ASRock and eliminate the brand, but I could really care less if they took ownership and sold both Asus and ASRock branded motherboards.
 
If I'm not mistaken, Asrock was created by Asus to provide a low cost option to their consumer? or am I wrong?
 
You're right, Asus and Asrock were the same thing until 2009 (if I'm not mistaken) when Asus and some other company split up (you can look in google).
 
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